Dear Netflix: Have some respect for your content and your viewers

Have some respect for your content. It’s pretty good. Can I just watch it, please?

Why can’t you just relax?

Why do you feel the need to play something all the time?

Your content is good. Your aggressive need to constantly decide for me when to play it is severely annoying.

Did I leave a show selected for more than 5 seconds because I was waiting until I was ready to watch it?

BOOM. Netflix gonna play a trailer that spoils everything.

Or, worse, yet, Netflix just gonna up and start playing the show I selected while I’m getting a drink or waiting for other people to get ready.

Do I get to decide when and how to watch?

No. Netflix decides. If you’d rather wait, you have to drop out of the main menus just so Netflix shuts up and stops telling you what to do.

While it’s nice that there’s a setting to stop auto-playing the next episode when watching a series, did you have to bury it in the web-only settings page? And did you have to set it to on, by default?

Of course you did. Because Netflix is like a shark: if it’s not playing content, it dies.[1]

Did you just watch a moving season-ending episode of Orange is the New Black? Was there an appropriate song chosen for the credits music? Did you want to watch the credits? Did you want to bask in the glow of a season well-ended?

Too fucking bad.

You’re going to see the credits shrunken to an unreadable postage stamp in the top-left corner while a poster for Wet, Hot American Summer takes up ¾ of the screen with a 15-second countdown timer threatening to play the inevitably insipid and mood-destroying trailer.

Instead of relaxing, you’re rearing up from the couch, scrambling for the remote control, trying desperately to figure out how to just keep watching what you were watching, to maintain the relaxed mood.

Too late. It’s already gone.

This is bullshit. Stop treating us all like noise-and-pretty-lights-addicted magpies who can’t even handle a 15-second break from content-consumption. Stop treating all of your content as garbage that doesn’t require any contemplation.

We already paid for the service. What advantage do you gain by cramming as much content as possible down our throats?

Stop treating us all like children.

I want a setting for adults.

Do not auto-play anything ever.

Do not shrink what I’m watching to pitch something else.

Get out of my way and let me enjoy the content I already paid for how I want.

[1] I actually went back to Orange is the New Black to watch the credits of the last show of season 5. I was listening to the credits music and starting this article. As I was writing, the credits ended and, true to form, Netflix waited about five seconds before playing a random trailer for a comedian I’ve never heard of—at top volume. Netflix was shut off with extreme prejudice.↩